Smoking bans and Sarah Palin

December 11, 2009
By Theodore J. King

In Going Rogue, the best-selling autobiography of the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, there is a paragraph that is of special interest to smokers, and I'll quote it for you. 

First, though, I should state that I didn't vote for her or, God forbid, Joe Biden because the choices at the top of their tickets were choices between bad and worse.  So I chose not to chose.  Also, in my column in The Oklahoma Constitution, a conservative opinion quarterly, I told my readers that Sarah Palin will not be elected to higher office because she resigned as Alaska governor this past summer rather than serve to the end of her term, which would expire in 2011.  I have no hidden agenda behind writing about Sarah Palin.  I believe she is through as a future presidential candidate. 

 On page 75 of Going Rouge, she writes about her time as mayor of Wasila, Alaska and her Friday morning breakfasts at a local restaurant where she would have feedback from the citizens of Wasila regarding the running of that city:

            I finally slowed down on that Friday-morning routine when I was pregnant with Piper [one of her daughters].  Nearly every pregnant woman has something that can make her instantly ill, and the cigarette smoke inside the cafe kind of nauseated me.  Instead of supporting a much-talked-about smoking ban at the time, though, I just stopped going to that restaurant.  It eventually went smoke-free on its own, which is the way things like that should work. [Emphasis mine.]

So-called "conservatives" like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty signed smoking bans into law in their states.  Instead of siding with the rights of private businesses, these men chose to go along to get along with the Nanny State control freaks.  Since the Nanny State extends to so much more than smoking, I fear any of these three men who may be running for the presidency would be loathe to scale back the encroaching Nanny State I may not be voting for president in 2012 - unless I am wrong about Sarah Palin's future.